Honoring God

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation sold a record number of guitars in 2020, driven in part by people forced to stay at home during the pandemic. The company calculates that nearly a third of those new musical instruments were purchased by people who play in praise and worship bands. This may not be surprising to anyone who knows a worship leader who are always wanting to “up” their guitars.

No one knows the first person to bring a guitar into church, but it became common in charismatic congregations in Southern California in the 1970s. Folk-rock went to church with the hippies who converted during the Jesus People movement. Guitars became staples of the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard church style before spreading to other evangelical churches.

The style signaled openness and authenticity to baby boomers raised on the Beatles. But guitars also had some practical advantages. They were portable. When a new church started in a school, or someone’s house, or even on the beach, no one had to haul over an organ. Guitars are also easier to learn to play than the pianos and organs traditionally used in church music.

Duke Divinity student Adam Perez says, “People joke about how simple it is—three chords or four chords—but that was a strength, not a weakness. You could have a beginner guitar player who learned to play to lead their small group or even a new church. You’re democratizing access to the sacred.”

Worship music in the 2020s is not all guitar-based, but industry experts know there is a lot of money in church guitars. According to Ultimate Guitar, an estimated one million guitar players are “gigging” at churches every weekend, and more people play praise and worship music than any other genre in the US.

There are two kinds of magnifying: microscope magnifying and telescope magnifying. The one makes a small thing look bigger than it is. The other makes a big thing begin to look as big as it really is.

When David says, “I will magnify God with thanksgiving,” he does not mean, “I will make a small God look bigger than he is.” He means, “I will make a big God begin to look as big as he really is.”

We are not called to be microscopes. We are called to be telescopes. Christians are not called to be con-men who magnify their product out of all proportion to reality, when they know the competitor’s product is far superior. There is nothing and nobody superior to God. And so the calling of those who love God is to make his greatness begin to look as great as it really is. That’s why we exist, why we were saved, as Peter says in 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

The whole duty of the Christian can be summed up in this: feel, think, and act in a way that will make God look as great as he really is. Be a telescope for the world of the infinite starry wealth of the glory of God.

In a 2015 commencement speech at Dillard University, Denzell Washington urged graduates to put God first and thank him constantly:

Put God first in everything you do … Everything that I have is by the grace of God, understand that. It's a gift … I didn't always stick with him, but He stuck with me … While you're [on your knees], say thank you. Thank you for grace, thank you for mercy, thank you for understanding, thank you for wisdom, thank you for parents, thank you for love, thank you for kindness, thank you for humility, thank you for peace, thank you for prosperity. Say thank you in advance for what is already yours … True desire in the heart for anything good is God's proof to you sent beforehand that it's already yours … When you get it, reach back, pull someone else up.

Researcher Christian Smith's book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, concludes that many young American adults have a faith characterized by "moralistic, therapeutic deism." According to this view of God, if we live good lives and if we're kind to others, then God will provide "therapeutic benefits" to us like self-esteem and happiness. Other than that, God is not involved much in our world.

This view of God has a profound effect on prayer. Smith found that American teens personally prayed frequently; 40 percent prayed daily or more, and only 15 percent said they never prayed. However, their motivation for prayer largely focused on meeting their own needs. Some of the teens interviewed said: "If I ever have a problem, I go pray." "It helps me deal with problems. … it calms me down for the most part." "Praying just makes me feel more secure, like there's something there helping me out." "I would say prayer is an essential part of my success."

But Smith also found that many young Americans' prayers lacked any sense of repentance or adoration. Smith writes, "This is not a religion of repentance from sin." Again, Smith concludes that this "distant God" is "not demanding … because his job is to solve problems and make people feel good. There is nothing here to evoke wonder and admiration."

Pastor/author J.R. Vassar writes about ministering in Myanmar (Burma) and coming upon a broken Buddha:

One day we were prayer walking through a large Buddhist temple, when I witnessed something heartbreaking. A large number of people, very poor and desperate, were bowing down to a large golden Buddha. They were stuffing what seemed to be the last of their money into the treasury box and kneeling in prayer, hoping to secure a blessing from the Buddha. On the other side of the large golden idol, scaffolding had been built. The Buddha had begun to deteriorate, and a group of workers was diligently were repairing the broken Buddha. I took in the scene. Broken people were bowing down to a broken Buddha asking the broken Buddha to fix their broken lives while someone else fixed the broken Buddha.

The insanity and despair of it all hit me. We are no different from them. We are broken people looking to other broken people to fix our broken lives. We are glory-deficient people looking to other glory-deficient people to supply us with glory. Looking to other people to provide for us what they lack themselves is a fool's errand. It is futile to look to other glory-hungry people to fully satisfy our glory hunger, and doing so leaves our souls empty.

According to film critic Nathaniel Rogers, in a 12 year period (2002-2014), 47 actors gave acceptance speeches at the Oscar award ceremonies. These Oscar-winning stars almost always offer thanks to someone for their achievement. Kate Winslet thanked her director Peter Jackson. Colin Firth thanked his producer Harvey Weinstein. Christoph Waltz praised his director Quentin Taratino as "the Creator." Other award winners have thanked other celebrities, including Oprah (two times), Sidney Portier (two times), and Meryl Streep (four times). Rogers also observed that God has only been thanked three times (once less than Meryl Streep).

Rogers concludes, "It's not that God is never mentioned … There's a reason for this notable lack of the divine, and it isn't the absence of religious faith. It's just that to actors, the director is god." Or in the case of George Clooney, Rogers claims that he thanked no one directly, because "who needs to worship a [god] when the man in the mirror [Clooney that is] is a golden god?"

Julia Sweeney is an actress and writer best known for her four-year run on Saturday Night Live and her solo shows. Her piece, Letting Go of God, she raises a common problem for contemporary atheists—why does God want (or even seem to need) our praise? Here's how Sweeney puts this objection to belief in God:

I'm living my life as a person who accepts the natural world. The whole idea that there's a God who cares whether people believe in him or not, like why would God care if people believed in him or not? That was one of the many things that I found so shocking reading the Bible. First of all, how insecure God is. I mean, God is so insecure he needs everyone to say, "You're the number one, you're the number one over all the other god's, you're the top god." And like, it's the most insecure character.

Editor's Note: Contrast Ms. Sweeney's view with this quote from C.S. Lewis: "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment … It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with … . Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him."

The February 19, 1930 issue of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran a story from Vienna, Austria of a woman named Corin Ward. Corin was a struggling actress who received a phone call from an attorney, telling her she had been mentioned in the will of a deceased client.

Meeting at the agreed upon time at the attorney's office, Corin was told that the will belonged to a man who wished to be known only as "Dr. Meszaros." Corin told the attorney she did not know any doctor by that name, and wondered if there had been some sort of mistake. The lawyer was not surprised that Corin didn't recognize the name. But there was no doubting that Dr. Meszaros knew Corin.

According to the good doctor's attorney, Meszaros lived in the same city as Corin, and had fallen head over heels in love with her. Meszaros, however, struggled with debilitating fears, and never worked up the courage to speak to the woman he admired from afar. But he also was unable to ever move past the woman who had captured his heart. He died alone. Meszaros left Corin every penny he had saved over the course of his life—all $50,000.

Meszaros loved Corin, but he never expressed his love in either words or actions. And, as a result, the fullness of that love was never realized.

Preaching Angle: Thanksgiving, Gratitude, Praise, Worship—Love always calls for a response. The real tragedy in this story is that Meszaros loved Corin but he never expressed that love. When we love or appreciate someone it's only natural to express that love. In our relationship with God, our love should lead to praise, gratitude, thanksgiving, and worship. As C.S. Lewis wrote:

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely strangely escaped me …. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise …. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game …. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation (C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, Mariner Books, 1964, pp. 93-95).

In 2012, a 19-year-old man from Washington state named Dakoda Garren was charged with stealing a rare coin collection worth at least $100,000. After Garren had completed some part-time work for a woman living north of Portland, the woman reported that her family coin collection was missing. Her collection included a variety of rare and valuable coins, including Liberty Head quarters, Morgan dollars, and other coins dating back to the early 1800s.

Initially, Garren denied any involvement, claiming that the police didn't have any evidence against him. But then he started spending the coins at face value, apparently unaware of the coins' worth. He and his girlfriend paid for movie tickets using quarters worth between $5 and $68. Later on the same day, they bought some local pizza with rare coins, including a Liberty quarter that may be worth up to $18,500.

The news article reported, "Garren has been charged with first-degree theft and is being held in jail on $40,000 bond. Which, technically, is an amount he could easily afford if the valuable coin collection were actually his."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Our Relationship with God—We honor God (or the things of God) when we treat him with the value he deserves. We dishonor the Lord—in our attitudes or in our actions, such as worship—when we treat God like an ordinary or even a cheap object. (2) Our Relationships with Others—In the same way, we dishonor other people (such as our spouse, our friends, our children, even our enemies) when we treat them as cheap objects. They should be treated according to the value God has placed on them. (3) The Importance of Rightly Setting Value on Everything in Life—We need to place ultimate value where it belongs, in the things of God that endure forever. The ability to discern true value is crucial, as seen in the story of Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of stew.

The word geek is a slang term for (a) A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy; (b) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially incompetent.

The word usually isn't intended as a compliment. But if you have a problem with your computer, cell phone, gaming device, or television, that's when you really want a geek around. There's even a company called "The Geek Squad" which proudly advertizes, "We're geeky, yes, but we also know what you're going through, because nobody is more into technology than we are." When you need The Geek Squad, you give them a call, they fix your problem, and then they leave you alone.

Is it possible to treat God in the same way that people treat the Geek Squad? In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis described approaching God in a similar way. At a young age, when C. S. Lewis learned that his mother was dying, he remembered that he had been taught that prayers offered in faith would be granted. When his mother eventually died, Lewis prayed for a miracle. Later, he wrote:

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when he had done what was required of him I supposed he would simply—well, go away. It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contract which I solicited should have any consequence beyond restoring the status quo.

Anytime we expect God to fix our problems, restore the status quo, and then go away so we can live without him, we've treated God like the Geek Squad.

In his book Letters to My Children, Daniel Taylor responds to a series of questions from his young children. At one point his son Matthew asks, "Church is getting boring. Why do we have to go to church?"

Here's part of Taylor's reply:

Think about it. If a friend of yours called and said that a famous athlete or singer was going to be at his house, and asked if you wanted to come over, wouldn't you go? And wouldn't you be excited? Of course! And so would I.

Well, church is the place where God will be, every time you go. Of course he is with you whether you're in church or not, but he can be there in a special way when many believers gather to celebrate him together.

"Sounds great," I hear you saying, "but then how come you fell asleep so much? If God is really there, I mean really there, then how come we aren't bug-eyed and breathless most all the time?"

That's a very good question. I wish I had a very good answer. Part of it is that God knows we can't take very much of him. It's like when you hold Fluffs, our hamster. If you squeezed very hard, Fluffs would be on his way to hamster heaven. You have to hold him gently, talk to him quietly. Well, God has to be sort of like that with us.

Truthfully, though, the biggest reason might be that we don't want very much of God. We want God to stay in his cage like Fluffs does. We are afraid of losing control of our own lives. We just want him to help us a little here, and forgive us a little there, and let us handle the rest. And so we try to make church a safe place where we can get a little bit of God but not too much.

We don't like surprises, not even from God, so we make our churches places where surprises aren't likely to happen. We ask God to come, but only if he will be polite. And therefore, little kids and adult kids often fall asleep—even if they keep their eyes open.

And yet, at the very same time, church is a wonderful place. God has chosen it, "sorry-ness" and all, to be the place where he will meet his people, the place from which he will send his people to all parts of the world to preach the good news about him.

Manhattan, New York, pastor Tim Keller once said that in 1970 a Sunday school teacher changed his life with a simple illustration.

The teacher said, "Let's assume the distance between the earth and the sun (92 million miles) was reduced to the thickness of this sheet of paper. If that is the case, then the distance between the earth and the nearest star would be a stack of papers 70 feet high. And the diameter of the galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high."

Then Keller's teacher added, "The galaxy is just a speck of dust in the universe, yet Jesus holds the universe together by the word of his power."

Finally, the teacher asked her students, "Now, is this the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?"

G. K. Beale writes in “We Become What We Worship”:

When my two daughters, Hannah and Nancy, were about two- or three- years-old, I noticed how they imitated and reflected my wife and me. They cooked, fed, and disciplined their play animals and dolls just the way my wife cooked, fed, and disciplined them. They gave play medicine to their dolls just the way we fed them medicine. Our daughters also prayed with their stuffed animals and dolls the way we prayed with them. They talked on their toy telephone with the same kind of Texas accent that my wife uses when she talks on the phone … .

Most people, I am sure, have seen this with children. But children only begin what we continue to do as adults. We imitate …. Most people can think back to junior high, high school, or even college when they were in a group, and to one degree or another, whether consciously or unconsciously, they reflected and resembled that peer group … . All of us, even adults, reflect what we are around. We reflect things in our culture and society … .

The principle is this: What we revere, we resemble, either for ruin or restoration. To commit ourselves to some part of the creation more than the Creator is idolatry. And when we worship something in creation, we become like it, as spiritually lifeless and insensitive to God as a piece of wood, rock, or stone.

"The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. The converse of this proposition is also true … . The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts … . It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it … . He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks."

To grow in wisdom and love is not to lose all fear of God; it is to change our fear of God. It is to pass from the servile fear of the slave, the fear of punishment, to the loving reverence of the son, fearing to offend his father, and in the end to the purely selfless fear of the lover, the fear of hurting what you love.

—Gerald Vann (1906-1963), British Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher

In his sermon “Big God, Little God” John Ortberg said:

Many years ago I was walking in Newport Beach, a beach in Southern California, with two friends. Two of us were on staff together at a church, and one was an elder at the same church. We walked past a bar where a fight had been going on inside. The fight had spilled out into the street, just like in an old western. Several guys were beating up on another guy, and he was bleeding from the forehead. We knew we had to do something, so we went over to break up the fight. … I don't think we were very intimidating. [All we did was walk over and say,] "Hey, you guys, cut that out!" It didn't do much good.

Then all of a sudden they looked at us with fear in their eyes. The guys who had been beating up on the one guy stopped and started to slink away. I didn't know why until we turned and looked behind us. Out of the bar had come the biggest man I think I've ever seen. He was something like six feet, seven inches, maybe 300 pounds, maybe 2 percent body fat. Just huge. We called him "Bubba" (not to his face, but afterwards, when we talked about him).

Bubba didn't say a word. He just stood there and flexed. You could tell he was hoping they would try and have a go at him. All of a sudden my attitude was transformed, and I said to those guys, "You better not let us catch you coming around here again!" I was a different person because I had great, big Bubba. I was ready to confront with resolve and firmness. I was released from anxiety and fear. I was filled with boldness and confidence. I was ready to help somebody that needed helping. I was ready to serve where serving was required. Why? Because I had a great, big Bubba. I was convinced that I was not alone. I was safe.

If I were convinced that Bubba were with me 24 hours a day, I would have a fundamentally different approach to my life. If I knew Bubba was behind me all day long, you wouldn't want to mess with me. But he's not. I can't count on Bubba.

Again and again, the writers of Scripture pose this question for us: How big is your God? Again and again we are reminded that One who is greater than Bubba has come, and you don't have to wonder whether or not he'll show up. He's always there. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to live your life in hiding. You have a great, big God, and he's called you to do something, so get on with it!

Sometimes I think that all religious sites should be posted with signs reading, "Beware the God." The places and occasions that people gather to attend to God are dangerous. They're glorious places and occasions, true, but they're also dangerous. Danger signs should be conspicuously placed, as they are at nuclear power stations. Religion is the death of some people.

—Eugene Peterson, U.S. pastor, scholar, author, and poet (1932-2018)